Central State Movie will Promote Paranormal Nonsense Click on the title to see the original posting.

by Dan Noland, member of the the Indiana Skeptics organization, posted October 9, 2006

Of course, I know they are skeptics, but I like to have my say especially when there are comments that are highly disagreeable.

Now, I like to think of myself as a fairly skeptical person with an open mind. Just ask my husband, when we review footage and we find something strange, I am the first one to ask a million questions about what it could be and what it couldn’t. I am the first one in the group to point out reasons why I think the evidence is not paranormal in nature. Until they convince me otherwise, it is pretty easy for me to dismiss most experiences. Our group as a whole believes that you can’t investigate claims of paranormal activity without some spiritual beliefs or sensitivity to spirits. That is what we are talking about here after all, and the fact that some groups claim to take a purely scientific approach just seems like a huge contradiction. We rely on the same, albeit unproven, “scientific evidence” that all of the other investigative groups use to verify and document activity, we just don’t depend solely on that information.

Everyone is certainly entitled to their own opinion, and I enjoy analyzing each viewpoint of a particular topic before making up my mind. I talk to people about what I do, and a lot of times they don’t agree, but I listen to them and sometimes incorporate a piece of their input into my own theories.

The biggest problem I have with this “blog” commentary about the documentary is the last two sentences that read, “neither the bad people nor their bad deeds can stick to a place after the fact. A place is just a place, no matter how awful its history.” I think you can find hundreds, if not thousands, of references to the contrary, throughout history, from reputable sources. Every religion, that I know of, has some instance of superstitious beliefs about places or objects, and even people. Not all of them are religious quacks, and not all skeptics are atheists. So even if they don’t believe that the souls of human beings can stay behind on earth, they may believe that we are visited by angels, or can have visions of saints, or that demons can influence events and actions, which all fall under “paranormal” in my book.

A more recent example that proves this is the events that occurred in Pennsylvania at the Amish school house where a man executed innocent children. Within a few weeks the Amish tore down the building because of what happened there. All over the world there are former sites of terrible tragedies that still exhibit paranormal activity. Whether it is a personal experience, or it is able to be documented by electronic equipment, I think there is something to it. I also believe that you will find that an overwhelming majority of the population agrees. Why else would shows like Ghost Hunters and Medium be so popular?

Maggie Zoiss, co-founder of Indiana Paranormal Investigations

back